


home; in fragments

by brewcha



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Study, Childhood Memories, Chirrut POV, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Culture, Introspection, M/M, a love letter to hong kong of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 07:42:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9874043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brewcha/pseuds/brewcha
Summary: This was what Chirrut remembered of Hong Kong. (And of course, the idea ofhomewas as intertwined with Baze as it had ever been.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> the need to write this fic hit me out of nowhere and so i just sat here for over three hours churning this out. HI YES this is my first time writing literally anything involving Rogue One, let alone everyone's favourite Gay Space Dads. it's mostly introspection and my attempt at writing them as scrappy teenagers in 20th century hong kong (i'd be satisfied with just 'scrappy teenagers'.)
> 
> this is mostly unbeta'd, but i hope you enjoy nonetheless!!

When Chirrut Îmwe was still small – a scrawny, scrappy little boy with big teeth, his mother would take him to the wet market every afternoon after picking him up from school. She’d set him on the handlebars of her bicycle, and they’d fly down the street together, flying past rickshaw pullers who hollered after them good-naturedly and ringing trams that steadily _chug-chugged_ their way over the tracks.

Chirrut loved the wet market. He liked the hustle and bustle of it all, the haggling from the strapping mothers and sharp-witted servants, the fishmongers hauling in buckets after buckets of ice across the slick market floor, the young butcher boys calling him _sai lo_ and teaching him how to whistle while he waited for his mother.

Even before his sight started to fade in his teen years, he found it was easy to find these images through his other senses: the heady smell of orchids that grew in the flower stall at the entrance of the market, rust and iron from the market gates, the watery smell of raw fish followed by the snap of plastic bags hung on hooks, hearty voices calling _take your pick! Mai lei gan!_ one right after the other.

When Chirrut told Baze this, months into their friendship at primary school, he had looked at him like he was completely out of his mind. Baze’s father was a mechanic, he owned a garage tucked a little ways in Kowloon, and Chirrut would realize afterwards that Baze always smelled of motor oil and wood chips. It clung to his short curly hair and even on his school uniform. Chirrut, at seven-years-old, decided he liked it.

On weekends, Chirrut’s parents would take him to the dim sum restaurant that been in the neighbourhood since before he could even remember. All the neighbourhood aunties and uncles were there with their children and grand-aunts and grand-uncles, and they’d call Chirrut _xiu wai_ and exclaim about how much he’s grown even though it’s only been a week, or that they had bumped into him and his mother at the wet market only just the day before and said the exact same thing.

There’s no such thing as a quiet meal when they went to yum cha; Chirrut and all the other kids would converge on the trolleys stacked with bamboo steamers. Many years later, Chirrut still remembered how the chopsticks would clatter together as his parents rinsed them with hot tea in the porcelain bowl, how he’d grip onto a hot steamer of cha siu bao even as it burned his fingers, how he’d stuff as much siu mai as he could until his cheeks were near bursting just because he _could_.

Baze’s mother knew how to make cha siu bao from scratch, and before Chirrut took to visiting Baze more in Kowloon (or: proceeded to invite himself into Baze’s house more), Baze would bring a box of three to school every now and then. The two boys would each have one - buns that were as soft and fluffy as clouds, the barbecued pork sweet and salty and syrupy - and then competed for the third one. They never stayed consistent with how they'd compete for it, but they ranged from who would climb the fastest up the school’s oak tree, to who would dash out to the school gates first, to who would win a game of rock-paper-scissors.

“Of course, I always won,” Chirrut said whenever this was mentioned. Baze cuffed him over the head each time – lightly, affectionately – followed by a grunt: “You once fell on your face during one of our races.”

In secondary school, Chirrut had decided he was unstoppable. He was a bit of a troublemaker, a bit of a class clown, yet he had the perfect ability to do well enough in his classes to avoid bringing the teachers’ full ire down upon him. His limbs were growing out and he was no longer scrawny, but he was still the scrappy kid with big teeth that made up half of his cheeky grins. He kept his hair short and cropped regardless of the fashions because it meant one less thing to worry about, even if some of the boys from neighbouring schools laughed at him and called him a monk.

(It was only when they started calling Baze a ‘big hairy ape’ because of his broad shoulders and bushy hair and growing stubble that Chirrut decided enough was enough.)

He won the hearts of all his schoolmates once when someone brought out a shuttlecock, and he was the only one who could keep the shuttlecock continuously flying up in the air for longer than a minute. After a while, he managed to not only be able to kick it in the air back and forth, but to also do a number of twists and turns and jumps and hand-claps each time until the basketball court fell silent.

Only Baze never did, because by then he was used to Chirrut being a show-off. In fact, he’d heckle him from some distance away and Chirrut would immediately drop the shuttlecock and run after him. All their schoolmates would hoot and cheer as they raced across the campus, trying to throw the other down into the dirt.

And everyday after school, without fail, Chirrut and Baze would walk home together. Even on the day Chirrut was forced to stay after school as punishment for fighting with the boys from the neighbouring school, Baze had waited by the school gates even as the sun slowly dipped across the sky, and they had walked home together. Their parents got used to them occasionally getting home minutes before dinnertime; to Chirrut, Hong Kong had never felt so endless in those carefree, careless afternoons. To Chirrut, it had felt like those carefree afternoons would last forever.

 

 

That was what Chirrut remembered of Hong Kong.

His colleagues at the university frequently compared it to New York, for all its tall buildings and hustle-and-bustle. Chirrut would not know, not exactly, because he grew accustomed to his loss of vision in Brooklyn, when his father decided he would receive better medical support in the States than in Hong Kong, and promptly called up a cousin of his who had emigrated here long ago.

Just like that, at seventeen years old, Chirrut’s life was plucked out of one city and planted into another one on the other side of the world. Just like that, Chirrut wouldn’t hear from Baze for ten whole years until one evening, when Chirrut was listening to a lecture recording, working on his PhD, the universe dropped Baze right on his doorstep as easily as it had separated them both.

When Chirrut opened the door, he had felt the dampness of the low drizzle from outside, the light wind from the gray, cloudy day – then he caught the faint smell of motor oil and wood chips, even after all these years, bringing forth a powerful rush of homesickness and yearning.

“Do you ever miss it then, your home?” His colleague would ask, after they had gone on about New York and Hong Kong for a while.

Chirrut would smile, a little to the colleague, mostly to himself. Of course, he’d say, because it was true, and because it was what most people would expect him to say. But that idea of _home_ was only everything he still remembered of Hong Kong – God knows how much all that had changed: if the dim sum restaurant he used to go with his parents was still there, if the trams still rumbled on the tracks the same way as they did when he was a scrawny little boy sitting on his mother’s bicycle handlebars, if they still grew orchids outside the wet market, if roasted chestnuts bought from street vendors even tasted the same anymore if at all.

He would not even be able to correct the visual image of Hong Kong a little bit, because the only vision of Hong Kong he would ever have was the one he carried with him away from there, over thirty years ago.

That was fine; that was _his_ , for him to carry.

And besides, in that drizzling evening, Chirrut realized he had decided, long ago, that Baze Malbus took up the place in his world that he called home.

 

.

.

 

(“You shouldn’t have done that.” Baze said as they left the school, Chirrut with a bruise on his eye and a Band-Aid over a bloody nose. He had some scrapes on his arms and god knows where else, but Chirrut had only grinned his big, gummy grin, as if it hadn’t mattered.

“You shouldn’t have done that.” Baze said again as they stopped by one of the street vendors, sharing a paper bag of piping hot roasted chestnuts between them.

Chirrut resisted the urge to say something along the lines of— _you should’ve seen the other guy!_ Because Baze, from the boy with big round ears who didn’t get why Chirrut loved wet markets so much to the boy who was tallest in their year and knew how to take apart an engine before algebra homework, had always needed comfort more than humour.

“I’m still here.” Chirrut found himself saying. The chestnuts were still too hot but he took one anyway, ignoring how it burnt his fingertips as he peeled it. “I won’t do it again if you don’t want me to.”

Baze didn’t say anything for a few moments, and when Chirrut finally looked up, he saw him squinting at him suspiciously. “How come I don’t believe you?”

Chirrut squawked, relief and warmth blooming in his chest. “What! How can you not trust me like that?!”

“Don’t throw your food at _me_!”

“I will _fight_ you!”

“Ow--! Chirrut--!”

A while later, they walked home in deliberate silence, chased off by a noodle vendor because they had half-crashed into his stall to an explosion of roasted chestnuts. They didn’t look at each other but they knew the expression on the other’s face: Chirrut did his best to look vaguely shame-faced, even though he was trying really hard not to laugh; Baze just looked exasperated, but the stifled snickers from Chirrut kept tugging at the corners of his lips.

They were only fifteen years old. They joked around as fifteen year olds do, pushed each other around like other fifteen year olds do. And yet—

Without thinking, as if it didn’t matter much, Chirrut reached over and took hold of Baze’s hand – clumsily, but firmly. Baze’s hand was bigger, calloused and rough from working all the time at his father’s garage.

Baze’s steps only faltered minutely, but he winded his fingers over Chirrut’s bruised, bumpy ones, and gave his hand a light squeeze.

Chirrut would always remember that moment as when the world seemed to bloom for the first time, like the sky had stretched out from their feet, like he knew exactly where he was willing to stand for the rest of his life.)

**Author's Note:**

> a few things:  
> \- hi, i'm from hong kong! 2016 might've sucked but it did give us baze and chirrut played by amazing chinese actors and with whom their chinese-ness was never diminished in any way -- so it feels completely natural to write them as chinese-hong kongers?? i love them  
> \- i don't have an exact timeframe of hk that i have in mind, but i will say a lot of what i wrote here drew inspiration from all the stories my mom would tell me about her childhood, and my own experiences living in hk. and also a teeny bit from my uni courses on transnational literature.  
> \- this is a bit like a love letter to hong kong - it's beautiful, it's crazy, it's humid as HECK in the summer, and i don't always love it, but it's rich and nuanced with the childhoods of my family, and i wanted to write something about that  
> \- i had a lot of other things i wanted to write in this fic - like something about missionary schools, chirrut being a Totally Attractive to girls and boys alike as an idiot teenager, more details about chirrut's blindness, university things, AND A REALLY CUTE "PRESENT TIME" SCENE WITH BAZE AND CHIRRUT AND BARBECUED PORK BUNS; i left them out in the end because otherwise the whole thing was going to become clunkier than it already is (i still want to write the last one though!! hopefully i will once i'm more confident about writing baze and chirrut's voices)  
> \- there was going to be slightly more angst but then i asked myself am i ready for that yet  
> \- (i'm sorry for my ??? cantonese; yum cha basically means 'going for dim sum', cha siu bao & xiu mai are popular dim sum dishes, sai lo usually means 'little brother' and is also somewhat equivalent to calling someone 'kid' or 'kiddo', and the nickname for Chirrut 'xiu wai' came from a spiritassassin fanart i saw a while back by a chinese artist!!)  
> \- finally: i wrote this whole dang diddly thing in one go late at night so please bear with me for any mistakes!!
> 
> thank you so much for reading, i very much hope you liked it!
> 
>  
> 
> (i have a tumblr, and that's @brewcha; you're welcome to yell at me anytime)


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